Holocaust denial in the PA: and rightly so

Unusually, the Fatah and Hamas governments agree on an issue. That issue is banning UNRWA Holocaust education lessons in Palestinian schools.

The issue is not whether Abbas personally recognizes that the event took place. He is no longer the Holocaust denier he was when he wrote his PhD thesis in Moscow decades ago. Palestinian Arabs, really, cannot teach their children compassion for the Jews who evicted them from their villages; and all those who live in the UNRWA camps were originally evicted. We Jews have good reason to defend the eviction, but we cannot expect the Arabs to share our beliefs.

And so the Holocaust lessons serve no rational purpose. They cheaply flout Jewish suffering in front of our future enemies, and teach them the opposite lesson: if respected European nations slaughtered their Jews, then Arabs can certainly get away with terrorizing Israelis.